In Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities, John Wei brings light to the germination and movements of queer cultures and social practices in today’s China and Sinophone Asia. While many scholars attribute China’s emergent queer cultures to the neoliberal turn and the global political landscape, Wei refuses to take these assumptions for granted. He finds that the values and pitfalls of the development-induced mobilities and post-development syndromes have conjointly structured and sustained people’s ongoing longings and sufferings under the dual pressure of compulsory familism and compulsory development. While young gay men are increasingly mobilized in their decision-making to pursue sociocultural and socioeconomic capital to afford a queer life, the ubiquitous and compulsory mobilities have significantly reshaped and redefined today’s queer kinship structure, transnational cultural network, and social stratification in China and capitalist Asia. With Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities, Wei interrogates the meanings and functions of mobilities at the forefront of China’s internal transformation and international expansion for its great dream of revival, when gender and sexuality have become increasingly mobilized with geographical, cultural, and social class migrations and mobilizations beyond traditional and conventional frameworks, categories, and boundaries. “This timely and compelling contribution to Chinese/Sinophone studies and queer/sexuality studies is a pleasure to read. John Wei explores a diverse, fascinating, and unevenly explored archive of queer materials, deftly deploying scholarship in multiple fields to analyze the emergent formation of queer Sinophone cultures.” —David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania “John Wei’s meticulously researched and rigorously argued new book sets a new standard for queer Chinese studies. Bringing together a dazzling array of ethnographic materials, films, and digital media, Wei proposes the concept of stretched kinship to show us how questions of sexuality are always questions of mobilities as queer migrants become ineluctably entangled with China’s compulsory familism and developmentalism.” —Petrus Liu, Boston University

What does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of such great importance? This book makes sense of queer cultures in China—a country with one of the largest queer populations in the world—and offers an alternative to Euro-American blueprints of queer individual identity. This book contends that kinship relations must be understood as central to any expression of queer selfhood and culture in contemporary cultural production in China. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, and questions Eurocentric queer culture’s frequent assumption of the separation of queerness from blood family. Offering five case studies of queer representations across a range of media genres, this book also challenges the tendency in current scholarship on Chinese and East Asian queerness to understand queer cultures as predominantly counter-mainstream, marginal, and underground. Shedding light on the representations of queerness and kinship in independent and subcultural as well as commercial and popular cultural products, the book presents a more comprehensive picture of queerness and kinship in flux and highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture. “The book makes a strong contribution to Asian queer studies through an in-depth theorization of queer kinship in the Chinese context, a comprehensive coverage of different types of queer media and popular culture, and an innovative discussion of homonormativity in the context of contemporary China. In a fast-developing and very competitive academic field, this book stands out as an important contribution.” —Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham “Queering Chinese Kinship represents the cutting edge of Chinese queer studies. Its sophisticated media analyses and provocative theoretical contentions reveal two central paradoxes: the interdependence of queerness and kinship despite China’s notoriously homophobic patriarchal familism, and the flourishing of queer public culture in spite of its infamously restrictive media environment. Brilliantly demonstrating how queer possibility emerges through a confluence of familial, media, state, and market forces, this book is a joy to read and a major contribution to the field.” —Fran Martin, University of Melbourne

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is the most up-to-date English-language study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed literature and culture in the Chinese-speaking world. From classical homoerotic texts to contemporary boys' love fan fiction, this book showcases the richness and diversity of queer Chinese literature across the full spectrum of genres, styles, topics and cultural politics. The book features authors and literary works from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora. Featuring chapters by leading scholars from around the world, this book rewrites literature, history and culture from a queer lens in China and globally.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book asks: what does it mean for Chinese non-heterosexual people to go against existing state regulations and societal norms to form a desirable and legible queer family? Chapters explore the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. The book unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations. Through its analysis, the book offers a new ethnographic perspective for queer studies and anthropology of kinship.

This book offers a critical analysis of global mobilities across China and Italy in history. In three periods in the twentieth century, new patterns of physical mobilities and cultural contact were established between the two countries which were either novel at the time of their emergence or impactful on subsequent periods. The first two chapters provide overviews of writings by Italians in China and by Chinese in Italy in the twentieth century. The remaining chapters cover: Republican China’s relationships with Italy and Italian Fascist colonialism in China during the 1920s–1930s; Italian travelers to China during the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1970s; migrations between China and Italy during the 2000s–2010s. In analyzing these cultural mobilities, this book opens a new line of inquiry in Chinese-Italian Cultural Studies, which has been dominated by historical study, and contributes a significant case study to the scholarship on global cultural mobilities.

Singapore remains one of the few countries in Asia that has yet to decriminalize homosexuality. Yet it has also been hailed by many as one of the emerging gay capitals of Asia. This book accounts for the rise of mediated queer cultures in Singapore's current milieu of illiberal citizenship. This collection analyses how contemporary queer Singapore has emerged against a contradictory backdrop of sexual repression and cultural liberalisation. Using the innovative framework of illiberal pragmatism, established and emergent local scholars and activists provide expansive coverage of the impact of homosexuality on Singapore's media cultures and political economy, including law, religion, the military, literature, theatre, photography, cinema, social media and queer commerce. It shows how new LGBT subjectivities have been fashioned through the governance of illiberal pragmatism, how pragmatism is appropriated as a form of social and critical democratic action, and how cultural citizenship is forged through a logic of queer complicity that complicates the flows of oppositional resistance and grassroots appropriation.

This book is an upper-level student source book for contemporary approaches to media studies in Asia, which will appeal across a wide range of social sciences and humanities subjects including media and communication studies, Asian studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and Asian studies, it provides an empirically rich and stimulating tour of key areas of study. The book combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in one up-to-date and accessible volume, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today.

This edited volume engages with a range of geographical, political and cultural contexts to intervene in ongoing scholarly discussions on the intersection of nationalism with gender, sexuality and race. The book maps and analyses the racially and sexually normativising power of homonationalist, femonationalist and ablenationalist dynamics and structures, three strands of research that have thus far remained separate. Scholars and practitioners from different geopolitical and academic contexts highlight research on the complexities of women’s, LGBTQ+ communities’ and dis/abled individuals’ engagements with and subsumption within nationalist projects. Homonationalism, Femonationalism and Ablenationalism: Critical Pedagogies Contextualised offers added value for those researching and teaching on topics related to gender, sexuality, disability, (post)coloniality and nationalism and includes new pedagogical strategies for addressing such timely global phenomena. This dynamic interdisciplinary volume is ideal for those teaching gender studies, and for students and scholars in gender studies, international relations and sexuality studies.

ABSTRACT: Homosexuality has always been an ambiguous topic in Chinese culture, and even a taboo one after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Meanwhile, the film industry has been a particularly censored field by the Chinese government, and all cinematic content relevant to homosexuality is banned in mainland China. Hence, this paper probes into this underground subject, Chinese homosexuality, by qualitatively analyzing three Chinese homosexual films. Especially from an intercultural perspective, the present paper focuses on the production of Chinese homosexual films, the impact of Chinese cultural values on homosexuality, and the cinematic presentation of homosexual identity in mainland China. The three selected films are Lan Yu (gay love), Fish and Elephant (lesbian love), and Queer China, Comrade China (comprehensive queer documentary). According to the comparison and discussion of the three films, homosexual films are still in underground state in mainland China. International film festivals as well as pirated products are the most popular channels to exhibit homosexual films. Familial reproduction and marital obligation in traditional Chinese values place critical obstacles in Chinese homosexual life, and public ignorance of homosexuality results in misunderstanding of homosexual identity. Queer studies and sexual identity models need their local adaptation in China. Homosexual films and LGBT movements are in need of more social concerns and supports to make progress in mainland China.

This collection gathers the contributions of ten scholars on the topic of transnational cultural and physical mobility originating in China. These contributions aim to open conversations among Chinese Studies scholars by applying a Mobility Studies perspective. Exploring diverse narratives and forms of representation from people of Chinese heritage, the book is divided into three parts that each look closely at the relationship between movement and cultural production. The first part is dedicated to four types of mobility of people from China to Italy, namely tourist mobility (Miriam Castorina), labor mobility (Valentina Pedone), student mobility (Xu Hao), and mobility of social elites (Andrea Scibetta). The second part is dedicated to examples of reverse mobility from Italy to China (Gao Changxu, Chiara Lepri, Giuseppe Rizzuto). The third part focuses on case studies based on mobilities from China to territories other than Italy (Rebecca Ehrenwirth, Martina Renata Prosperi, Giulia Rampolla).